Abstract

Pharmaceutical and personal care products (PPCPs) are regularly used by human being for their day to day life. These products contains various chemical compounds which are regularly added in our surface and ground water sources either through untreated or partially treated domestic and industrial wastes or through agricultural runoffs etc. These are present at the concentration of µg liter-1, and at such low concentration also these have shown harmful affect to living being. A lot of studies have been carried out for studying their effects on animal biodiversity, which can directly or indirectly affect human being also. So their removal from waste water is essential. Various technologies are being tested for removing these compounds from polluted water; bioremediation is also one of them. Present chapter will briefly give the description of various PPCPs present in waste water, their impact and removal technologies available for their removal with special emphasis on bio remediation.

Background

Bioremediation was first used by the Romans, at around 600 BC, to clean their waste water. This process was officially invented in the 1960's by George Robinson. He had experimented with microbes inside of polluted glass jars. In the 1970s, Ananda Chakrabarty and his colleagues at General Electric discovered a strain of bacteria that is able to degrade some components in crude oil. He obtained this strain by isolating a Pseudomonas from a soil filled with. First commercial in situ bioremediation system was installed in 1972 to cleanup a Sun Oil pipeline spill in Ambler, Pennsylvania. The Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989 in Prince William Sound, Alaska, was the genesis of global attention to this process. Importance of bioremediation is that it can completely destroy contaminants, converting them to carbon dioxide, water, and new cell mass. So this can be a good technique for removal of PPCPs from waste water.